Question

I’m trying to use python to launch a command in multiple seperate instances of terminal simultaneously. What is the best way to do this? Right now I am trying to use the subprocess module with popen which works for one command but not multiple.

Thanks in advance.

Edit:

Here is what I am doing:

from subprocess import*

Popen('ant -Dport='+str(5555)+ ' -Dhost='+GetIP()+ ' -DhubURL=http://192.168.1.113:4444 -Denvironment=*firefox launch-remote-control $HOME/selenium-grid-1.0.8', shell=True)

The problem for me is this launches a java process in the terminal which I want to have keep running indefinatley. Secondly, I want to run a similar command multiple times in multiple different processes.

Answer 1

This should stay open as long as the process is running. If you want to launch multiple simultanously, just wrap it in a thread

untested code, but you should get the general idea:

class PopenThread(threading.Thread):

    def __init__(self, port):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.port=port

    def run(self):
        Popen('ant -Dport='+str(self.port)+ ' -Dhost='+GetIP()+ 
                ' -DhubURL=http://192.168.1.113:4444' 
                ' -Denvironment=*firefox launch-remote-control'
                ' $HOME/selenium-grid-1.0.8', shell=True)

if '__main__'==__name__:
    PopenThread(5555).start()
    PopenThread(5556).start()
    PopenThread(5557).start()

EDIT: The double-fork method described down here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3765162/450517 by Mike would be the proper way to launch a daemon, i.e. a long-running process which won’t communicate per stdio.